South-east Asian leaders tread carefully amid rivalry

Consensus is almost always achieved at a snail’s pace in the 10-country Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN), but the members had an unexpected added reason to paper over their differences at this year’s get-together.

The decision by Japan’s new conservative government to flick the switch from economic stimulus to historical denial would have made the smaller Asian countries nervous about a new regional storm involving China.

South-east Asian unity has been placed under the greatest pressure since the Vietnam War era by China’s claims on the energy rich South China Sea, as was demonstrated by the inability of a foreign ministers’ meeting a year ago to produce a wrap-up statement.

The leaders were set to avoid that sort of public disaster at this year’s summit where the diplomats from the centrist players such as Singapore and Indonesia would have been working overtime.

Getting any ASEAN agreement on a code of conduct for the South China Sea will be a largely symbolic diplomatic exercise if there is no clear buy-in to joint discussions by China, which would much prefer to pick off the claimant countries – the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei – one by one.

But it is better than being publicly split, and so broader efforts continue to encourage Chinese participation in regional bodies like the East Asia Summit, where the balance is a bit more equal given the participation of India and the United States.

This week’s move by Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to apparently deny that Japan invaded any country in World War II probably won’t provoke much public response from ASEAN governments, given their dependence on Japanese investment.

And so far China has been quite restrained, unlike South Korea where the new president Park Geun-hye will now visit Beijing before Tokyo – such is the ill-feeling between new conservative leaders. Seoul also called in the Japanese envoy on Thursday to protest Abe’s comments.

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But south-east Asian governments will be more concerned that north Asian tensions may spill over into slower intra-regional economic activity, and that Abe will become distracted from his promised economic reforms which should boost domestic demand for imports and some offshore investment.

Given the US won’t be happy to see its Japanese ally refocus on backward looking nationalism, there will be questions about how smoothly the newly initiated negotiations on Japan joining the US-backed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade zone will go.

So the ASEAN nations also had extra incentive at this summit to push ahead with their preferred but slower moving trade zone, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership – in which ironically China will have more influence.